I will not be posting this anywhere else. If you should see it elsewhere, kindly inform me.

Author’s Note: I realise that FF:SW wasn’t popular, but if you’ve seen it, give me the benefit of a review, okay? I wanted to see if I could explain how Aki had gotten infected in the first place – I was first inspired by the opening of Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society where Motoko is falling through the Net and wondered if Aki could hack something like that. The rest of this story, ironically, came to me in a medicine-induced dream; I was pretty sick and had to take medications that would allow me to eat at the cost of my day. They would put me to sleep for around six hours, but in the thirty minutes I would be awake, I was able to eat and drink. [I’m feeling much better as of January 26th].

She floated through the swirling maelstrom of colours, gasping for breath even as she delved deeper and deeper into the stream of available information. The cold tendrils brushed her body while she did so, each touch causing her to shudder and almost cry out as each transmitted a shock through her lithe body. Each tendril belonged to a Phantom, she instinctively knew, but it seemed so strange for them to even be present here, in the data stream. She wasn’t unintelligent, though – she knew that they were at least partially present and that she was in danger – and she pulled away briefly to assess her situation, she saw the first hint of it.

Gaia.

It was strange to her at first – this was just an outside data stream she was hacking, right? If the phantoms were red or orange, this part of the stream was blue and violet. As she chose to dive into it, she felt… clean. Pure. Absorbing the direct flow of information, she realised that if only they could find the eight spirits, they could very possibly rid the world of what others saw as the phantom ‘menace’ or ‘infestation’. She knew differently – to her, they had always seemed lost and abandoned, as if they were accidential travellers on their meteor.

And as that revelation hit her, everything went black.

—–the spirits within—–

“-ki. Aki. Wake up.”

The world was blurry, but she tried to focus and as she opened her eyes, the bright light nearly blinded her.

“Sid?”

“You almost died in there. What were you thinking?”

“The spirits. I saw it all, Sid. I saw spirits leaving Gaia in the data – someone must have realised that before they died! They’re the only things that can stop the Phantoms. And I know what to look for,” she excitedly explained, calling up a virtual dashboard and putting in the various wavelength patterns as she smiled.

“That’s amazing!” he exclaimed with a slight smile, watching over her grey-clad shoulder. “Yes, we have a chance now. We should report our findings to the Council.”

“Wait, Sid,” she replied, sitting up quickly and reaching for his arm, even as the world blurred again. “There are… there are eight of them.” As she said that, a piercing pain shot through her chest and she fell back to the medical gurney. “The Phantoms… inside me…” She groaned and closed her eyes, desperately hoping against hope that the aging doctor could do something for her, because it was at the point that she could no longer do anything for herself.

“Aki! Aki, what’s wrong?” Touching her forehead, he felt her clammy skin and decided to scan her body for Phantom particles; there were only a few documented cases where something like this had happened in the twelve years that they had been on the Earth, but the new micro-laser surgery held promise – and it was Aki’s only hope. Touching the virtual keypad, Sid began to seek out the particles he knew had to be present.

“Systems on,” the cool voice replied to his touch. The lights dimmed to allow him concentration as the beams danced over the young scientist’s immobile body until the holographic representation panel above her centred in on the swarming mass of particles. A twinge of nausea hit the man, but he continued to lock each laser onto the particle individually. The particles were beginning to spread – once they did, he would have to kill Aki unless he wanted her to become one of the human-size Phantoms herself.

They seperated as soon as he fired the laser, and Aki groaned in obvious pain even in unconsciousness while he tried to seek them out. As he continued desperately to save his assistant, the monitor behind him beeped once, then twice. He knew what it was – there was a spirit on its radar. The first spirit had already been detected. Apologizing mentally to Aki, he left her side to see where it was comnig from – perhaps it had the potential to save her from the fate she had incurred by entering a raw current of data from a source outside of New York City. That was when he saw the readings.

The first spirit was Aki.

It was probably because of her indirect brush with Gaia, he decided. Narrowing down the focus, he was able to trap the free-floating pieces of the spirit and he began to carefully weave them together to create the sphere that would hold the particles in check within her body.

The blue dome glowed visibly around Aki’s body and slowly began to close around her as her hazel eyes gently opened to watch in awe as the strands wove together. Reaching a hand out towards it, she found that she could move her hand through the flow. Gasping suddenly, her back arched and she fell to the gurney, her eyes wide open but unseeing, though in reality she was observing the feeling created by the barrier now within her. The lights began to rise and Sid turned back to his protégé and saw her hand over her chest, breathing hard as she realised what had happened.

“The first spirit…” she breathed in awe. “It… it’s inside me. I can feel it pulsing – like a second heart.”

“Yes, I thought that might be the case,” Sid sighed, scanning her body. “It looks like for now, your body is adapting around the microsphere, but I will have to design a chestplate for you to control it should it begin to drain on your vital systems.”

“Sid, as it is now, I’m not going to live long,” she flatly stated, her unspoken question haging heavily in the air.

“That is true,” the aging scientist replied, sitting down and putting his head into his palm while he watched her. “I would estimate that you have no more than a year, maybe a year-and-a-half if you stay out of trouble.”

“A year, then, to collect the seven other spirits. Sounds fun,” she said lightly over her shoulder, gauging her mentor’s reactions.

“What? Aki, you can’t. It hurts me to say this, but I’m taking you off this project.”

“You can’t, Sid,” she laughed. “You can’t,” she repeated, “because I’m the first one of the eight spirits. The first of humanity’s only hope.”

“That is true,” he admitted quietly. “Perhaps it will take less than a year to cure you and save the rest of the remaining humans.”